


For a Purpose

by Calyps0



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: And like, Angst, Coping, F/M, Panic Attacks, Post-TRoS, Rey's POV, Sort Of, Then again, american consumerism, and its existence of supermarkets, because all i write is angst, ben and rey move to coruscant, ben survives, but in a non capitalist-honoring way, finding a purpose, how many rollerblading weiner dogs could there be in this city?, i don't explan how ben survives palpatine ok?, i'm just nostalgic for supermarkets ok?, if i ever publish my fics i want the audiobooks to be narrated by the guy from curious george, just assume he does, just like, navigating city life, no surprises there, rey grapples with her lost childhood, the aesthetics, this is technically in universe but i'm taking liberties with coruscant's urban planning, tros fix-it?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:13:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29279772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: Youth belongs to the daydreamers.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

Youth belongs to the daydreamers.

 _Her_ youth—a brief, sparkling thing, cut precipitously short—had been filled with lots of that. Daydreaming. Mostly silly, inane things. Not so much the make-believe and the dress-up befitting other girls her age—ones who did not grow up on desert planets, who did not barter for every calorie as if in the midst of an ouroboric numbers game—but more the _transformation_ , the ordinary into extraordinary.

She’d find herself—sometimes for hours at a time—splayed torpidly on her back, staring at the ceiling (which, given the walker’s positioning when it fell, was actually a side wall), and imagining with childlike-whimsy the architecture of an upside-down floor plan. The air-filtration gauge had blinked querulously at her, in alternating _red-blue-green_ LEDs, and if gravity suddenly reversed itself she might use it as a drink coaster, or a seat for an imaginary companion. Upside-down tea parties shouldn’t be reserved for storybooks alone.

But the wind and the cold hadn’t been good dining companions. She’d shut them out of her dreams, unwelcome guests.

Not that she ever had _real_ guests. But if she is honest with herself she’s almost glad of it. Well water does not turn into tea, no matter how many dried leaves she’d mashed into it. And no matter how meticulously she formed them, tongue pulled charily in against her teeth in forced concentration, the cakes she _did_ have were only ever made of sand.

***

It is two long, burdensome, dust-filled decades (plus a few less dusty but no less difficult months) until the walker starts to feel _less_ like reality and starts resembling something more like _memory_. She wakes fewer and fewer nights contemplating its rust-sorry fate, or fretting about her dried-out nightbloomer, or searching for her steel pin with which to scrawl another interminable tally.

Everything else, though, is still as difficult as it’s ever been, because old habits die _hard._


	2. Chapter 2

Coruscant is not a planet—it simply _can’t_ be. It can’t be whatever Jakku was, because this spinning rock happens to be _alive._

What hits her first, of course, is the _force._ After the war she’d wanted nothing more than to get away from all the diplomacy and the ceasefires, from the political double-speak and the meandering debrief sessions. Her head _ached_ for blissful emptiness.

The intent was good, if nothing else, but the desire had lasted only until the ship landed, and then the sheer _magnitude_ of the force signatures beneath the atmosphere had nearly felt powerful enough to splinter her skull completely apart.

 _That_ had faded, after the first night or two. She thought that would be the end of it.

But arriving here had only been the beginning. Forget the color _green_ —every _day_ she discovers something _else_ she doesn’t know about, things that extend far beyond the visible spectrum. She encounters solutions to problems she’s never had, samples foods whose taste she has no textural comparison for. There are unspoken rules, understood courtesies, backwards customs she has to observe several times before a pattern becomes clear.

She is loath to admit it, but fighting the First Order (as difficult and dangerous as it had been—and it _had_ nearly been the end of everything) hadn’t _actually_ been so different from defending herself at Niima Outpost. Searching for the truth about her parents didn’t bear much distinction from searching for another useful ship part, another fractioned portion, another borrowed day. Survival is a familiar motivator, one she’s got the right skillset for.

(Alright, so she had almost _died_. She can admit that. But she’s almost died plenty of times. It had all been, in the end, a numbers game, and numbers are _predictable.)_

But now—now she feels very out of her element. This life is not a numbers game, or a question of survival, or a fight in which there are only two possible outcomes. This life exists in a stratum of fiction that she couldn’t have in her wildest daydreams conjured up, no matter how many meandrous hours she spent contemplating her _red-blue-green_ -lashed fantasies.

Because this is a _city_ life.

And a city life, apparently, is synonymous with _consumerism_ , with holos and advertisements and something she is told is called _prop-a-gander_ , whatever that is, although she quickly gathers that it is something to be ignored. But the truth is that she’s never had _any_ spare credits to spend on anything, and suddenly she _does_ , and there are just so many bright, shiny, tintinnabulating things to _buy._ They wink at her from lit-up storefront displays, tempt her from condensation-bubbled vending machines, lure her in with plush, sweet words from blaring overhead speakers. Every street corner sparkles like a casino, except what she’s betting on is everything she has ever possibly wanted, plus everything she hasn’t but now thinks that maybe she _could._

She still feels weird about it—off-kilter, overfull—so she shakes her head world-wearily, and turns to look at _Ben._

Ben— _her_ Ben, now, she cravenly reminds herself—is effortlessly comfortable here. His intel had ended the war, and he no longer worries about hiding his face, or obscuring his figure in quilted yards of monastic black. His posture is straight but relaxed, and most of the time she finds herself following his shadow, and wishing she could find it within herself to do the same.

Of course, he’s used to cities—he’d visited dozens of times throughout his childhood. He knows how to navigate the sidewalks without crashing into people, glides a cruiser effortlessly through intersections with maneuvers even _she_ wouldn’t dare attempt. He can interpret the glittering street signs so he doesn’t get lost down the crisscrossing crosswalks, calculates _just_ the right angle to avoid the glare flickering off the bright neon roadside signs.

They’re shopping in a supermarket now. It’s her fifth—no, _sixth—_ time here, a greed she hadn’t dared imagine even as a child, for fear it would be too ravenous. Two decades on barren sand leave no imagining for extra food, let alone an entire _warehouse_ full of it. Shelves upon shelves of it, kept warm or cold—enough to feed all of Jakku for decades over, enough to occupy the square-footage of the Goazon Badlands, enough to maybe do it twice. And it’s all just _there,_ sitting on shining shelves, waiting patiently to be purchased. Sure, _people_ can afford to do that—wait and wait their entire lives for the right person to come along—hell, she’d been prepared to do it herself. But food? It’s the height of reckless indulgence.

It’s also—thought it doesn’t look it from outside—absolutely _freezing_ in here. She can’t tell if it’s stemming from the profusion of refrigerators or from whatever it is they’re pumping in from the overheard vents.

It’s probably both.

And even as she loves him for taking her here—for gifting her the chance to see the galaxy, to step outside the reach of starvation, to have the space to simply _exist_ —she also kind of _hates_ that he has the gall to stand there and scan the aisles lazily, as if the sheer _excess_ doesn’t disturb him, as if the words jumping out at him are perfectly clear and reasonable instead of the miasma of meaningless - _isms_ and _percent-offs_ that give her a headache to take in all at once. There’s too much _red_ jumping out at her. It burns her retinas.

She’s still not used to it, yet. But she wants to be. She wants to _belong._ So she imitates his investigatory scan of the aisle signs, printed in oblique, authoritative Basic. He’d had the vague intention of finding some Alderaanian-copycat noodle sauce he thinks she’d like, but as he ducks down another likely aisle she is stopped short mid-perusal by a small child admiring a fish tank.

Inside is a pair of orange lobsters listing lugubriously in cloudy, sea-green water, both sporting rainbow rubber-banded claws and matching curlicued antennae. The child has a red balloon in her tiny fist. She’s wearing technicolor pastel overalls, and her hair is brushed up into two golden pigtails, with a severe, comb-even part.

She wants to stare at the tanks for hours, imagine another fanciful daydream tableau with as much backwardness and bravado as her upside-down tea party. Perhaps the lobsters could join in. They might perch beside the ceiling fan, drink delicate flowered teas, use the whooshing slats as a Lazy Susan with which to pass back and forth raspberried petit-fours.

She snorts at her precociousness. _Hellhound Two_ never had a _ceiling fan_ , especially not on its side wall.

Ben takes that moment to reappear at her side, a chunky plastic basket in hand, filled partially with ingredients but mostly with bright, technicolor logos. She takes his offered hand and glances back at the tank. The child is being led away by a man with matching blond hair.

The lobsters’ antennae seem to wave back at her. She keeps her eye on them, and doesn’t slide her gaze over to the fish counter or its gold-rimmed glass case, where other—markedly less vibrant—lobsters sit, their graying shells unmoving on pockmarked ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have no idea how often i'm gonna update this but thanks for coming along on the ride anyway!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> y'all i am just barely hanging on

If she has ever learned the definition of hubris, it surely must be this: a shining silver box in the sky.

Because once she’d gotten over the voices and the force signatures and the rows and rows of food (no easy feat, all told), she’d then had to consider the _apartment._

It is— _ostensibly_ —understated opulence, replete with clean, die-cut lines and tasteful chromatic appliances. Ben had mentioned (with a cool, practiced shrug and an expression of feigned nonchalance) that it used to belong to his grandparents. She resolutely chooses _not_ to think too much about that.

Not that she’d be able to think about it too hard anyway, simply because of the wealth of _other_ sensory information being thrown at her.

Between each blink they greet her, like Alice’s flower-and-playing-card creatures: gleaming countertops, plush mattresses, linens that smell like fresh-cut roses. Fresh vegetables and fruits, kept dewy, condensation-cold. Heat on a cold day, air conditioning on a hot one. An oven, real bread. A boundary-ignoring, overpolite bot to indulge every errant whim, if she is ever at an inclination to do so, _Miss Rey._ And even if she closes her eyes to shut them out—deny all the excess—her ears still ring with its evidence. The electric hum of the conservator, the whining air recycler, the air conditioner whirring, whirring, _whirring—_ sounds that no matter how hard she looked could not—even in one single _iota_ —have been found between those long-lost decades of dunes.

Even _those_ , she could have gotten used to.

But once she steps outside, it becomes something _else_. All around there are people—determined, _purposeful_ people—dressed in finery and striding down walkways and jettisoned in speeders and followed by bustling droids. People who know what they want out of life and—even more incomprehensibly—exactly how to _get_ it.

She thought—often, in those twinkling, windswept days—that once her family came back, her troubles would be over.

Not—and this is an important distinction to make, even though the realization is a profuse, unswallowable lump in her throat—because they would take her away from Jakku, or from junk trading, or from a life of servitude.

 _No_ , the only thing she _ever_ imagined them taking away was the _loneliness._

They would live a good life on Jakku, together. Her parents would move into her little sideways bunny hutch of a home. They might even help her get the really good finds in the starship graveyard. Of course, they’d have to work hard, because there would now be three mouths to feed instead of one. But it was okay, because they’d be there beside her, scaling decommissioned cockpits, erasing her tally on the wall, helping her spruce up her walker. She’d even left a little space on the kitchen table, just a blank expanse of durasteel, enough to fit a family photo.

(It’s still there, of course, in the dunes, a little gestalt imaginary square on which to balance a frame, bordered by old engine parts and a copper scrubbing pan. Probably less than four square inches, all told. It was the only amount of hopeful mania she’d allowed.

The tally marks were pragmatic—time markers, she told herself—so they didn’t count.)

But the dreams hadn’t extended beyond that. She’d figured she would live and die there, her bones bleached milky white in the wind and the brittle sand.

Instead, she is _here._

In an _apartment_ , in a _city_ , with a _refrigerator_ and a goddamned _cleaning_ _droid_ and a man who _loves_ her and that’s all beyond compare but there’s just too much _noise_ and _—_

The thing about Ben—well, one of the things, because there are a _lot_ and some of them she is still discovering—is that he’s much more perceptive than he takes credit for. The bond helps, of course, but even when she shuts him out and falls into lengthy periods of self-introspection he has an uncanny knack for guessing _exactly_ what she’s thinking.

When she’s with him it’s easy to feel as if this is all she will ever need, within four pretty walls that—despite their loud nights and mornings and fervent overuse of electricity—make her feel _safe._

But then again—

“You’re restless,” he remarks, one night when she is nestled within the hollows of him, when he is not quite but nearly enough to crowd out the thoughts and the lights and the sounds. And _yes,_ she is sated and drowsy, _yes,_ she wants to sleep here forever—somewhere between his collarbones and the sharp juts of his hips—but he’s right, there’s a _buzzing_ , and it’s something she needs to address.

And _yet._

There were no walls in the desert, so she’d had to learn to build her own.

“Stir crazy,” she deflects, even though she had spent all day wanting to get back to the apartment, to get _out_ of the streets flooded with people. Flying might help, she muses, but only if she could fly entirely away.

He doesn’t even hesitate. “Try again,” he says.

She blinks. Of course he’d see right through that. “Homesick?” she counters.

“I don’t think so.” His mouth quirks firmly downward. “One more time, sweetheart.”

She huffs. She doesn’t answer him, gets out of bed instead, stalks ponderously to the window. The glass is cool and she presses her face against it. She can feel his gaze settle somewhere between her shoulder blades. In her periphery, he is a bleary blur. He doesn’t get up, doesn’t come behind her, doesn’t meet her eyes in the reflection of the glass. She’s grateful. He understands that solitude is another habit that’s hard to break.

Her breath fogs up the glass. Her forehead is freezing and the city lights are dark and bright, on and off, in parroting, indiscernible patterns. But—and she feels this is essential to note—not _once_ does it ever go completely black. Something is always on, twenty-four interminable hours a day.

Saying she’s out of her element feels reductive. Saying she feels like she’s been dropped into an alternate universe might be closer to the truth, but sounds unforgivably ungrateful, even to her own ears. She’s not ungrateful. The apartment is beautiful, really. Her eyes land on a pitcher filled with lemon water. It’s multifaceted glass, makes little striping rainbow on the countertops when the sun hits it. It probably would have netted her a dozen portions just months ago—another habit she has to forgo. A few fuchsia-petaled flowers float languidly on its surface. She can’t quite remember what they’re called.

Gratitude goes out the _window_ in the face of this. She’d probably have to say _‘thank you’_ from now until eternity to feel like she’s truly earned it.

But she can’t get this feeling out of her head. Her mind goes—unerringly, haphazardly, like a trigger-happy self-guided arrow-tip— back to her first supermarket visit, just a few days after landing here.

Ben—in what she had first interpreted as affection but had later realized was likely out of an abundance of caution—had held her hand, walked her carefully up and down the aisles, making sure she didn’t wander too far off or get swept up in the crowds of people.

She’d gripped back, grateful, when he steered her out of the way of passersby and formed a two-person line with his broad shoulders, like the most insipid game of follow-the-leader.

Eventually he’d ducked down to inspect a label that had caught his eye—not so immune to propaganda, so it seems. It must have only been a few seconds, though it had seemed much longer.

She’d tried to stay put, she really did. But that moment was all it took—just one bright unguarded second—and she had found herself entranced. The logos, colors, ads were dizzying, coming upon her like fumes, like an endless parachute after hitting the ground. Transparent, yes, but the color was _everywhere_. She needed to see the sky, that was all, she just needed to make sure that once she went back to the real world, not everything was _red._

(Of course, finding the exit was trickier than she had anticipated.)

When he found her again, barely ten minutes later, eyes just a fraction too wide, she’d been sitting inside one of the dairy fridges, solicitously cradling a carton of eggs.

She winces at the memory.

She still doesn’t have the hang of the shopping carts, or how to use credits exactly, but instead of the panic she’d felt then, now she just feels embarrassment. It suffuses her cheeks, two matching crimson splotches.

“I’m sorry,” she says now, to the blinking lights outside, “about the eggs.”

She can see his expression in the glass. His forehead furrows, that little beloved crease appearing between his dark brows. The incident in question had been _weeks_ ago.

“It’s forgotten,” he reassures her when he ascertains her meaning.

Forgotten, is it, how she had nearly broke down and went back—not just back to the apartment but back to _Jakku,_ where everything made sense? She doesn’t think he understands how close she had gotten there, beside the fruit-flavored milk and the clotted creams and the thick caf sweeteners and their leggy smiling mascots. Giving up isn’t something she’s used to doing, but she had _wanted_ it then.

It is too hard to walk down the streets with the stiff clothes everyone seems to wear here, and the stiff shoes and the stiff walks. It is too hard to walk in the supermarkets and the restaurants and the cantinas that are nothing like the sand-streaked ones of her memory but instead loud and bright and filled with unfamiliarity.

(If there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s waiting. Waiting, however, entails a certain presumption of sameness. But now every day is different, there is no routine, there are visits and bus rides and subways and the underground trains—frightening, high-speed passageways cramped elbow-to-elbow with people hanging onto handrails, packages held tight between their knees. She’s never seen so many people in one place.)

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“You didn’t know any better,” he demurs. “It’s an overwhelming place, even if you’re used to it.”

She wants to believe him, except she doesn’t know that it’s true. Up until a few months ago she had known only sand and decommissioned ships. _He_ had spent a _decade_ on ships, too, but _living_ ones, which even if they weren’t like _here_ must have bustled with people all the same.

(But she should be used to that, right? She’s been on the _goddamned Supremacy_ , right?

Apparently, a few scant hours—primarily spent in frenzied, survivalist adrenaline-high—isn’t enough to acclimate.)

Just last week he’d made the truly disastrous decision to take her _bowling_. The room had been all dark and glossy varnished wood, the people all dressed modern and sleek. After observing a few frames the goal seemed simple enough: roll balls into striped pins until they fall.

She hadn’t quite understood the point. It was far too _simple._ Admittedly, games hadn’t been something she’d ever had growing up—which is rather quite easy to do, actually, when you don’t have anyone to play with, or the funds to do so—and when she’d asked Ben he’d simply shrugged and told her it was just for _fun._

Which—didn’t help at _all._ She’d never done anything just for fun. Flying ships, maybe, but she maintains that doesn’t _really_ count because they serve a purpose beyond entertainment. But here you knock the pins down and they go back up. What does any of it matter at all?

It hadn’t even proved to be very good force practice. After Ben had explained the objective, she had simply willed the ball where it was supposed to go. Her perfect score had blinked at her from the plasma screen. She’d had about as much fun as the pinsetter droid.

Ben—in what she determined to be either a curious, explicit departure from character or just a brief, enquiring jaunt into madness—hadn’t used his powers. More than half of his peculiar-grinned, gangly-armed rolls had gone straight in the gutter.

On the way home she wondered why he had let her win, when clearly he could have tied with her just as easily. But he just laughed, as if she was a precocious thing. His kiss on her cheek and his merry _‘congratulations’_ had only made her feel hollow.

It was the first time she’d heard him laugh at _her_ expense. Usually it’s a nice sound—his laugh—something treasured, boyish and sweet.

But now—now it just makes her feel as if he knows something she _doesn’t._

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading my nonsense! <3


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